Beginning October 14, Spybot started taking an unusally long time to scan. The last scan before that was on September 24 and it took 7 minutes and 30 seconds which was typical time for a scan. I changed NOTHING in settings after that nor did I acquire a large number of new files. So, the October 14 scan and every scan since then should still take about 7-8 minutes. However, the October 14 scan took 27 minutes! The scan yesterday took even longer at 32 minutes!
Beginning with the October 14 scan, CPU usage by Spybot has jumped to an average of 80% and varies between 60-100% during the scan. This makes the computer sluggish so that I can't really do anything else for what is now about 35 minutes to scan the same files that were scanned in 7-8 minutes in September and earlier.
What could be the problem? I've used Spybot since its inception and I don't recall it ever being this slow or using so much CPU when scanning.